One step forward; Two steps back,...

So yesterday was a pretty good day,.. today,... not so good.

Yesterday was wonderful up until mid-afternoon when things went downhill, but then he seemed to rest through the night. This morning started off with catastrophy written all over it. He's having pretty strong side effects from the pain medication,.. it's comparible to morphine so it's understandable (Oxycodone), but what a nightmare,... some times he's fine, and others it's just awful. Extreme sweats and then sudden & severe chills that cause his chest to ache with pain,.. a feeling he described as feeling as though his chest were packed with ice. These episodes follow his doses of Oxycodone, and are common side effects,... that doesn't make them any less scary when it happens. It mimics over-dose too much for my taste. I spent the first half of the one this morning in a near constant dash swapping out cold wet washcloths on his forehead, back of his neck, and around his face, and washing down his body,... then the chills hit, and it was all I could do to get him warm again,.. rubbing his arms & legs and covering him with several blankets,.. building friction in my hands so I could lay my warm palms on his chest on both sides of his incision to help take away some of the icy chill,... the poor guy was miserable, and once I finally got those side effects under control, the numbness set in again,.. three fingers on his left hand went completely numb like they did on his right hand Saturday evening at the hospital. After several minutes it comes back. He gets very weak and sleepy, and then crashes for about 3-4 hours. This doesn't happen every time, but he needed the higher dosage of the Oxycodone this morning because his pain level had shot up,... a terrible nightmare (again, thanks to the narcotic) yesterday late afternoon, and he had clawed his chest... right across his incision. The intense pain sent him into an instant sweat and still in the throws of the nightmare he dreamt he was covered in blood,.. at the same time waking, and in a panic and unable to get his sleep mask off fast enough to see,.. feeling the sweat on his hands and thinking he was covered in blood,.. it was not a pretty end to an otherwise good day. And so, he awoke this morning with his stomach in a tight knot from the gastrointestinal upset caused by the 'mare the night before which in turn caused immense pressure on his lower ribcage and radiated up through his severed sternum..... a chain effect,... then severe nauxia, dizziness, and on into the epsiode I described above. Picture if you will a display of dominoes as they fall one by one from the next to the next to the next, and the pattern continually changing and getting more complex as it goes,... that was how the majority of today went. Things finally eased up though, and he had a fairly uneventful evening,........... thank goodness.

Unfortunately, that wasn't the end to our "what else could go wrong" type of day,... Scott's dad called this evening with news that now his mom is in the very hospital we just left from! For those that know, and for those that don't, and who may have not read through the archives here yet,.. Scott's mom has been battling ovarian cancer for 4 1/2 years now. She is in near constant pain from the cancer, the tumors, the chemo, and multiple herniations across her stomach, among many other things... and although she tries to hide it, her constant pain is obvious. She cannot have surgery to repair her stomach because she really needs a complete grafting done across her stomach to fix it, and the risk of infection is too great which would also mean having to stop chemotherapy,.. which wouldn't be good either. She has been struggling with new pains here lately, and they became so unbearable that she ended up in the hospital. She's being kept overnight for observation,.. they've done a CAT scan and some blood tests, and she's scheduled for a procedure tomorrow afternoon to check on some other things... they're suspecting an inflamed bowel, and hoping she won't require surgery... that would be an immense risk. A colonoscopy should help determine what's going on, and what needs to be done... we'll know more tomorrow. Please be praying for her,.......

Any way you look at it, it has been a very trying day,... 'rough' is a good word,... 'miserable' is a better one. These are things to expect though,.. one step forward, two steps back,... or three,... or four,...